Conveys the emotional toll exacted by years of cleaning up after human misdeeds, but lacks the crisp narrative and grit of...
Twenty-five-year veteran Sutton proves that there’s little glamour in police work.
He patrols low-income neighborhoods a few miles from the glitter of the Las Vegas strip, usually on the overnight graveyard shift. The 19 vignettes here reveal a world of domestic abuse, drug use, petty theft and random violence. An honor student hangs himself after receiving a less-than-perfect report card. A daughter beats her dying mother to death in a hospice bed. Gang members slay a grandmother in front of her grandchildren for complaining about the noise the gang members were making outside her tenement window. Victims are often the most innocent and defenseless: young children run down by cars, infants shot in drive-by shootings, the mentally unbalanced vagrants who have slipped through the social services net. When not on the job, Sutton (True Blue, 2004) spends his evenings alone, trying to drink away the grime from his last shift. It’s a grim portrait, relieved only by the rare uplifting encounter. In the last and longest vignette, a fellow police officer is lifted from a suicidal depression by a sick puppy he finds in a Dumpster. In an earlier tale, Sutton’s heart leaps when a young black girl hugs him after he helps her across a busy intersection. The author clearly knows these mean streets. Unfortunately, his narrative suffers from clumsy, overreaching prose and a maddening lack of crucial detail. Too often, he leaves us stranded at crime scenes without telling us whether victims lived or died, or if arrests were made. A rookie cop, in tears, phones Sutton after his partner commits suicide. A few days later, the rookie sends Sutton the same cryptic message that he’d retrieved from his dead partner’s car. Did the rookie also commit suicide? We never know.
Conveys the emotional toll exacted by years of cleaning up after human misdeeds, but lacks the crisp narrative and grit of the truly satisfying police story.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33896-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
A memoir-cum-how-to-manual for the aspiring Dirty Harry of the family. Coulson, a retired FBI agent who founded the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, has little patience for soft courts and slimy lawyers. “My territory,” he writes, “was full of decent, hard-working folks whose rights were being denied, not by an oppressive government, as the Founding Fathers anticipated, but by criminals like that scum-sucking crack dealer we’d just busted.” The territory, it develops in his narrative, was also full of right-wing militia crazies and Middle Eastern bombers, who kept Coulson hopping—and hopping mad—throughout his career. To counter such illicit types, Coulson and his colleagues in the FBI’s special-weapons and tactics unit adopted an unpleasant but effective philosophy: “scare the shit out of them, and they’ll give up.” Coulson reserves a special disdain for paramilitary groups like the Montana Freemen, the Order, and the CSA (or Convenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord), groups responsible for hate crimes across the country. A good-guy player in some of the most newsworthy crimes of the last few decades, Coulson takes us inside events like the shootouts at Ruby Ridge and Waco, the “Dog Day Afternoon” bank robbery, and the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings. Without apparent irony, he relates how the FBI got into the SWAT-team business in the first place: because federal law prohibits the use of the military in domestic affairs without specific presidential order, police forces throughout the nation have militarized. Coulson examines where these forces have performed poorly, such as at Waco, and where they have performed well, such as in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Despite the assistance of Time correspondent Shannon, Coulson’s prose is clichÇ-ridden and self-important, but the stories he has to tell offer an unusual inside look at how the FBI works. (16 pages b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02061-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
A solid re-creation of the rape-murder of Karen Gregory in Gulfport, Florida, and of the resulting trial, by the reporter who first covered the case for the St. Petersburg Times. On May 22, 1984, 36-year-old Karen, white, a graphic artist, had just finished moving her things to the house of her black boyfriend, David Mackey, an administrator of a counseling program for Vietnam veterans—and out of town at a conference. In small, conservative Gulfport, the interracial couple ``stood out.'' That night, a woman's scream was heard by a number of people as far as several blocks away; one man said, ``I'll never forget it,'' But no one called the police. Thirty-one hours later, roused by Mackey, who was unable to reach Karen by telephone, the Gulfport police broke in and found her bloody body, stabbed to death many times. So began a long, tedious, often dead-ended investigation led by Sergeant Larry Tosi. French takes the reader through it step by step, revealing what Tosi learned just as he learned it, bit by bit, with a frustrating lack of evidence at first, false suspects, unexplained details, and confusing polygraph tests. Finally, a suspect—ironically, a friend of Tosi's and known for his good works as ``the neighborhood helper''—was arrested; though never confessing to the crime, he was convicted and is currently doing time. Crisp and clear, with vivid characterizations and with the intricacies and frustrations of the police investigation and subsequent trial well explained.
Pub Date: May 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05526-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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